Over the past several years street-crossing signals featuring countdown lights have slowly appeared at intersections in various cities, informing pedestrians how much time they have to cross. In Taipei this idea received a new twist with the addition of a green man that runs increasingly faster as time runs out. The LED figure’s motion is animated in a sequence of…

When Americans in the architecture scene look abroad, their focus too often lands on the same celebrity practitioners. In Italy, their gaze falls on Renzo Piano (although some also see Massimilano Fuksas not far in the distance). But what if we could put on special glasses, ones that could dim the blinding brightness of starchitects in the post-Bilbao universe? What…

From the patenting of the incandescent lightbulb in the nineteenth century to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of light-emitting polymers (PLEDs) in 2000, new technologies have long challenged designers to refine the task lamp. In this time line we present eight of the innovative task lamps of the twentieth century. Among them are an early example of glass used as an…